Each family is like a small state. There is the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Jomier) and the spending ministries (Tilly, Henry, Louisa), and every year there is a quarrel about the allocation of resources – utilities, rates, income tax, food, versus clothes, dinner parties, holidays, school fees. Jomier favoured expenditure on ‘plant’ and ‘infrastructure’ – car, gas boiler, television, washing machine – whereas Tilly went for consumables – restaurants, parties, school fees, trips abroad. The most intractable dispute had been over contributions to a pension fund. Jomier turned thirty-five: he was now halfway through the biblical time span of three-score years and ten. It was time – high time – to start contributing towards a pension. Jomier took advice. The calculations were daunting. Huge sums were required to ensure a modest income in old age. His mind became befuddled with projections, estimations, tax benefits, annual increments, terminal bonuses: but it was clear that if he wanted to maintain a reasonable standard of living after retirement, he must make significant contributions towards a pension for the rest of his working life.

Tilly disagreed. Tilly was suspicious of financial advisers. She thought they had a vested interest in scaring her husband with visions of penury in a future that may never come. Her counterproposal: ‘Something will turn up.’ Jomier had pressed her. What would turn up? He, Jomier, might rise to becoming one of those barristers who earn a million pounds a year. Or he might become a judge who can go on working until he is senile and then retire on an index-linked pension. Might. Might. These were possibilities against the certainty of old age. OK. The certainties. His parents would die. Her parents would die. Their houses would be sold. Unless, countered Jomier, they had already been sold to pay for carers.

The conflict between Tilly’s optimism and Jomier’s financial-adviser-abetted pessimism had reached a critical point one summer when Jomier had told Max that they could not afford to share the rent of a villa in the Dordogne. Tilly was angry. More than angry – she fell into a tearful rage. For the first time in their married life, she had seized Jomier’s Saturday midday spreadsheet printout and seen through her tears that a sum that might have been spent on their family holiday had gone on a nebulous ‘pension contribution’. There were arguments. More tears. Sulks. Misery. Jomier had stood firm. It was the duty of a paterfamilias to resist the jam today of a holiday in the Dordogne for the jam tomorrow of The Laurels Old Peoples’ Home. In the event, that year, and in the years that followed, Max and Jane rented the villas and invited the Jomiers as their guests.